Origins of the Perl Programming Language

Perl was originally developed as a language to replace awk and sed in Unix system administration.
It has since become the defacto language for Internet programming as well, and today it's hard to find a system the is not using Perl for one purpose or another.
Perl is a scripting language which means that it runs directly from the source code. There is no separate compilation process.
But, it is not a strictly interpreted language either.
The program perl actually compiles much of the source code into an intermediate byte code which is then optimized before running.
The effect is a language with many of the advantages of both interpreters and compilers.
With its flexible syntax and rich regular expressions, and full library of internal functions, Perl has allowed me to open up my creativity as a programmer. I hope it does the same for you.

Perl History

Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier.
Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions. Perl 6, which began as a redesign of Perl 5 in 2000, eventually evolved into a separate language and both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams.
The Perl languages borrow features from other programming languages including

C,

shell script (sh),

AWK, and

sed.

They provide powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix commandline tools, facilitating easy manipulation of text files.
Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its regular expression and string parsing capabilities.